Once a potential customer first submits an offer, even if you do not accept the offer, you can no longer edit your listing and would need a new listing which gives you a new listing number.

There is no blocked bidder list because a blocked bidder, if malicious, can just come back on another name. So, on this website, all sellers can selectively screen bidders by accepting or rejecting them once they make an offer.

After you have inputted your listing and are viewing the preview, there will be a "post product listing" button. When you post your listing, this website reads what is in the editable form fields, not what is in the preview so if you change stuff in the form after the preview, then that is what will be in your listing regardless of what it shows in preview.

Contents

♠ Paid vs. Free listings
♦ Just for Anonymous
♠ The different fields
♦ Title
♦ Description
♦ Seller's Preferred Price
♦ Automatic Counter-Offers
♦ Image Selection
→ Imageshack Wrapper
♦ Visibility
♦ Miscellaneous
♠ If you sell brand name/trademark items
♠ XHTML tutorials
♠ Misc Questions and Answers

With paid listings, items automatically relist until the items are removed from being active or the seller runs out of funds in their account. Sellers are charged a tiny amount per day with the rate prepaid each thirty days. When a listing is closed, the site credits fees for the remaining days (rounded down) back to the seller.

With free listings, the upgrade to a larger description is free whether you add it initially or add it later by editing the listing. Free listings do not auto-renew. Free listings do not show up in your funds history. What listings are free is noted in the "features" column in your my.x.listings pages.

Just for Anonymous

Anonymous listings are all free listings and function as such.

If you supply a password to a listing, you can edit it and also view statistics on it via the Manage Listing page. If your listing becomes suspended, you will need to go there to view the reason.

When your listing closes, you do not receive an email about it.

The title and description fields use full UTF-8, a common form of Unicode that allows characters from almost any language and symbol characters to appear. Low ASCII except for line down codes in the description as well as high ASCII that is not UTF-8 code are all filtered out. For the other fields, they are ASCII or numbers only.

People searching will be able to search using UTF-8 characters, too.

Title

Title size is a maximum of 80 characters (not bytes), which is the size of the box you enter text in. In the title, we replace < and > that mess up XHTML code with similar Unicode characters, 〈 and 〉. This does not alter the character size that they take up compared what they replaced, but these replacement characters have odd spacing when you view them on your screen. We also make the same replacement for people searching for the < and > characters.

Description

Description size is a maximum of 40,000 characters. For over 5,000 characters, there is an extra fee. If you think you want more than 40,000, please keep in mind that buyers aren't likely to read your whole description if it's 40,000 characters anyway. After the maximum amount of characters you select (5,000 or 40,000), the site will truncate your description and give you an error message to let you know.

Description is XHTML or HTML. If you don't know (X)HTML, just use "<br/>" without the quotes whenever you want to move the text down a line. Don't be concerned about a fancy layout as with presenting all the information that the buyer needs, for instance if you're selling computer memory, then give plenty of details about what type it is.



The following are not allowed in the (X)HTML code in your listing and will be replaced by HTML entities so they do not function as code but show up normally as text.

"<script" is disallowed because JavaScript is either used for:
(A) Security violations such as account hijacking, seller's scripts automatically causing buyers to submit prewritten feedback from buyers, creating endless nonstop dialog boxes, making your browser freeze up, and more. Some websites also can install keyloggers and other malware just through javascript alone -- certain web advertising networks are known to do this. JavaScript can also load any foreign content that can cause untold abuses.
(B) Preventing the buyer from using their right mouse button, middle mouse button, keyboard, and/or selecting text while viewing the listing. Sometimes this has this comes along with a popup message saying, "don't steal my text or pictures". This prevents buyers from viewing sellers' feedback, angers people, and ends up with people who turn JavaScript off just to steal the sellers' pictures and descriptions purely because they feel that people who abuse JavaScript in that form deserve it. People that disable right click with abusive JavaScript are purely sadistic people. Firefox 3.5 and possible Opera have options that can block this abuse from JavaScript, but only only blocks some of it.
(C) Another extremely sadistic people do is using JavaScript to prevent people from pasting text into a field. Older browsers are immune to this but newer ones are vulnerable.

FYI: Have you ever seen websites with simple links should be "<a href" links and have no more functionality, but are instead made so they do not work with javascript disabled and clicking with the right mouse button to open them in a new window or tab results in opening an empty page? People who put those fail-links in do not know basic HTML and completely fail at web design. For unknown reasons, many large companies always hire designers that do this.

Since JavaScript is out, "<noscript" is also filtered out since it would just be used to hide things.

"<iframe" is out since it can embed any webpage into anything and is a security issue.

"<style" and "<link" -- these tags are supposed to only work in the <head> section of the (X)HTML code, but browsers still render what's in them no matter what in the (X)HTML code they are.

<base <head <html <body <meta <title -- are out as they are for basic (X)HTML layout and not for what should be in a listing.

"<frame" is out as if someone can get it to work in a listing, it could cause a security issue.

NOTE: for all <name, the closing </name is also out.


Additionally, "top", "bottom", "fixed", and "absolute" are specific tags in the style="" part of (X)HTML tags and these are disallowed because someone could use them to overwrite menu buttons on this website and send buyers to fake sites such as phishing sites. These are only filtered out if they are found inside (X)HTML tags and there is the word "style" in there as well and if so then all of these four words are filtered so the first letter is replaced with an "x".


Anything converted to HTML entities will be larger and reduce your maximum character size of the listing.

Q: Sometimes when I put in a listing description, it messes up the HTML of the form below it in preview.
A: You did not close one or more of your HTML tags and so made code errors. You need to fix this in preview so it does not do the same when your listing goes live.

Using, XHTML code, you can reverse text in the description. Start with one of these:
<bdo
<span
<div

end with
dir="rtl">
or
dir="ltr">

like so: <bdo dir="rtl">test</bdo>
Produces:
test


These are the unicode control characters below. (Things like U+202E are the unicode hex values and things like &#8238; are HTML entities.) Only U+202E seems to make it go right to left. The rest tend to just do left to right:

U+202A &#8234; ‪ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202B &#8235; ‫ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202D &#8237; ‭ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202E &#8238; ‮ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202C &#8236; -- this one is actually a closing character and we'll repeat the above with this character before a second alphabet and you can see the changes it makes.

U+202A &#8234; ‪ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz ‬abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202B &#8235; ‫ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz ‬abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202D &#8237; ‭ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz ‬abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

U+202E &#8238; ‮ abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz ‬abcdejghijlmnopqrstuvwxyz

We are not sure how to get U-202E into the clipboard other than it being copied along with some other text with it.

Q: Why don't you have a rich text editor to the listing form?
A: The reason is because these are completely awful things.

Now when people create some fancy (X)HTML code in their listing, they either do it in a text editor or they do it in a special program that is faster and far better than what a mere website can do. Or if they do it in a website, they at least find a specialized website for it and not just use any website's HTML designer.

Then, once people are done with their design, they are done and rarely need to edit it again. They don't want for every single time they open a listing editor, even to fix a small typo, to have to load a huge, bloated editor that makes the page load slower, hogs their CPU, and encourages their browser to crash.

If one has a lot of listing to make or a bunch of changes to edit in a lot of listing, loading a bunch of bloat just makes it take forever to do. This is especially true because the bloat eventually will crash one's browser if one is doing enough listings. What's more, a lot of times the rich text controls don't work on a lot of versions of browsers, such as the one in hotmail when you try to edit the body of the mail when composing.

Random Plaza's current Create Product Listing form takes about a second to load on dialup. A rich text editor in a create product listing form will add from 15-60 seconds on a high speed connection to load and 30 seconds to several minutes on dialup. A lot of websites that like to follow the trend of making their sites as high bandwidth as possible, simply will never finish loading on dialup and the dialup user must engage in a long battle to force the website to finish loading the page and end up giving up when it never does. Plus a bloated rich text editor on every listing edit form use up your computer's memory and processing time and encourage your web browser to crash. On Random Plaza, with our javascript-less listing create and edit forms, you can have a hundred windows open to edit a lot of listings at once and know that the non-bloated design will keep your web browser from crashing.

This is all intended to be a benefit to you, the user. If Random Plaza does at some point add a rich text editor, it will not be forced into the listing editor and instead be a separate page where one can load it optionally.

Seller's Preferred Price

The seller's preferred price is the price of the item the seller is offering to buyers to say they are satisfied with that amount. Buyers are able to make an offer to the seller for less than this.

To make everything standardized, the site stores everything internally in euro (€) as its base currency. The euro is the closest thing to an international currency in the world. (Although we live in the USA, we do not use its currency as base to keep our site international. The United States dollar for most of the 20th century had been the reserve currency (the backup currency nations and organizations kept if their present currency ever lost most of its value) and it's allowed the United States Federal Reserve to print endless money that it neither possessed, nor taxed, nor borrowed while only suffering inflation and not hyperinflation. The Federal Reserve also likes to keep inflation going. But your company lives in the USA, so why not base it on the US dollar? Well, here's an example. In the year 2000, the US economy was going strong and so The Federal Reserve thought the US dollar might actually gain value, which means deflation, and they did not want that so they started doing things to cause a credit bubble. Later on, the same year, power companies starting jacking up California by never supplying power to it for much of the rest of the year due to issues with price gouging. With most of the high tech companies in California losing money from this, tech stocks plummeted and the US economy started to go down. Then the presidential administration that came into power in 2001 watched the pilot episode of a TV show called The Lone Gunmen, read The Illuminati Protocols, and thought it would be fun if their administration did a lot of things described in those works, and they also thought that even though nobody else has been able to achieve peace in the middle east, they could do it in a short time and so they tried, doing all that while also spending as much money as they possibly could while cutting taxes and printing a lot of money they neither taxed nor borrowed. So the economy further went down and so did the value of the dollar. To try to boost the economy, the Federal Reserve kept making the credit bubble larger, making the dollar further go down. The credit bubble started to burst and so in 2008, the government decided to spend trillions of dollars in multiple bailouts to the large companies, causing more inflation. You get the idea. If you would like the Federal Reserve to stop doing this, then please visit http://www.campaignforliberty.com.) The euro as a currency is so stable against inflation that some members of the European Union even complain a lot that they no longer have a currency that they can deflate whenever they like to boost their economy. Due to its low inflation, the euro is gradually supplanting the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

When a seller lists, they will set the listing as their home currency, which the buyer pays, but it will be internally stored standard in euro. For instance if their currency is Japanese yen, they will say the currency is yen, though the amount in yen will vary but the euro amount will stay the same. When the seller accepts an offer from a buyer, the buyer will then see the specific amount in yen printed out as what they owe as a static amount that no longer changes based on euro to yen conversion rates. So if buyer sends the seller a money order, it must be in yen and not euro so the seller can deposit it in their bank without currency conversion fees. If the buyer pays by credit card, then the static amount of yen set at the euro to yen conversion rate at the time their offer is finalized is what the buyer owes based in yen.

The listing itself will list the seller's preferred price in euros, and then the seller's own currency, and then various popular currencies.

The price amount can be from one cent (hundredth of a euro) minimum to one hundred billlion euro (100,000,000,000) maximum. Buyers may offer anywhere from a cent to this amount. A buyer cannot offer higher than the seller's preferred price as a protection against someone spamming the search results by underpricing their product. Adding a lot of surcharge to the price (like local telephone companies in the USA do to their rates) is considered spamming and not allowed.

If a buyer offers the full amount, the seller still gets a chance to approve them in case you do not trust them. The seller sees the buyer's user ID so the seller can check the buyer's feedback, but the seller cannot get the buyer's email until the seller accepts the buyer's offer. If the seller accepts an offer, then both parties receive each other's email addresses.

If your listing is offering to pay someone money, such as offering employment then you should put in the money amount you are offering. You can search based on a minimum and maximum field so if you are looking for something that pays $20 an hour, you put the maximum top amount in at the hundreds of dollars so $40,000 a year doesn't get mixed in and if you are looking for $40,000 a year then you would put a minimum in the thousands so you don't get it mixed up with hourly wages. Employment offers probably will just put an email to contact and not accept any offers through the offer system.

After an anonymous buyer confirms their email, the anonymous offer goes through without your approval with the amount they want because Anonymous cannot leave feedback. Anonymous does not see your email address automatically. Instead, the seller receives the anonymous buyer's email address and both parties receive a randomly generated confirmation code (not stored on this website) to let the buyer know that the person emailing them is the seller.

After the seller accepts, the seller then sends an invoice to the buyer through whatever checkout system the seller has chosen.

If a buyer wants multiple items, they will make an offer and if you accept, they can then buy multiple items at that price.

Automatic Counter-Offers

For this, please see the section "Automatic Counter-Offers" in Help with Making Offers on Products.

Image Selection

The image goes in the top of your listing when potential buyers view it.

If you do not wish to upload an image, then you can stick with a randomly generated "picture unrelated" image. The small text at the bottom is stating the image's license, which is public domain, creative commons, or such.

The maximum image size is 1000x1000 pixels and larger images will be proportionately shrunk. If your image is over 300x300, then a link to the full size will be given to people viewing the listing.

JPGs are the only allowable file type. JPGs are compressed at 20%; that is 20% below the 100% maximum quality and this is the standard JPG compression amount.

If your file is over 1,000,000 bytes, it will be rejected instead of resized. A 1000x1000 JPG with standard compression is around 200,000 bytes.

Images when uploaded are stored in a temporary area and deleted after a couple hours. If you upload your image and don't finish editing, and then come back after several hours, your image will be deleted.

For uploading of files to Random Plaza using a URL instead of an upload through your web browser, please see this page.

We one day will improve our picture hosting. For now: If you have multiple pictures, you can combine them into one image as 1000x1000 is quite big. You can also use an offsite hosting service like photobucket.com and imageshack.us.

You can also use the form below (which may or may not work):

Imageshack Wrapper

This form allows you to upload directly to www.imageshack.us and the upload goes to them and not through our website. Imageshack site allows JPG, GIF, and PNG. BMP will be converted to PNG. This uses their free image hosting with a size limit of 1.5MB per image and has some kind of monthly bandwidth limit that if reached, they'll not display the image anymore.

If the upload works correctly, you will be sent to imageshack's website where you get a "Direct link to image" that you can copy and use.

Q: How do I protect my images from being stolen?
A: Put a watermark right in the middle and make it a semi-transparent one that covers the middle and is impossible to photoshop out. This is the only way to truly protect your images from someone stealing it and claiming it's you. Keep the original, unwatermarked version and watermark the image with if you're on randomplaza.com, you use your userid there and if you use it elsewhere, you use a different identifier there. There are other techniques like hiding it behind a transparent gif that only foil newbies and the other one of hacking someone's right mouse button so it doesn't work (which is a form of denial of service attack) is easily thwarted by someone disabling javascript; some people even have javascript disabled by default as there are so many websites that abusive javascript ranging from annoyances to security issues.

Visibility

The option "neither" lists items just on this website and are searchable on this website.

Invite-only listings are viewable by entering the correct password, which must be at least 10 characters and a maximum of 30. The password must be purely alphanumeric characters. If a logged in user has already made an offer and it has been accepted, then they can view the password through the accepted offers page found through Navigator. In addition, while each account's two passwords are encrypted in the database and the first is encrypted in a way that is not reverse-decryptable, the passwords to view invite-only listings are not encrypted in the database. Invite-only listings, like all listings, have an image-name that cannot be guessed by the listing number. Invite-only listings also do not appear in this website's main search index whereas the other two options do. People can search invite-only listings using the search listings by seller function.

For listings submitted to Google Product Search and Google Base, google has a product search engine (formerly called froogle).

Miscellaneous

Inventory Check URL -- This is for a feature that will be added later for sellers who dropship to check a page for a string like "404 not found" or "the item is not found" in bulk for a lot of listings at once to see if their dropshipper no longer carries the item. Right now it only stores the URL. Later there will be functions to check the stored URL. 2000 characters maximum URL size. URL must start with HTTP; one day we may work on coding to read HTTPS pages, but today is not it. This is only for listings that are not free listings.

Most importantly, if you sell anything with a brand name in it or related to a trademark, please put all the proof you can that these are legitimate items, such as if you are an authorized reseller. Random Plaza is not asking sellers to give out their suppliers and that information is generally considered a trade secret. On many community marketplace websites, people sometimes go around making false accusations against people so no one can even resell items they once bought at a store without someone falsely accusing them of bootleg. There are many cases where people who own the intellectual property to the items, list the items for sale and some other party falsely claims they own the copyright. There are even cases where a person will sell an original painting their non-famous friend painted and it gets returned by customs as "Reproduction: not accepted into France." When selling online, people can't verify if something is authentic or not until they get it in person and there are so many organizations that go and have a guilty until proven innocent philosophy about this sort of thing. So for every listing, please include in the description something to let people know your item is legitimate like if you are an authorized reseller, if you bought it at a store and it's used, if you got it as a gift, etc. whatever you can say really helps. (If your item violates intellectual property, it is not allowed to be listed here.)

• A quick reference on XHTML 1.0 tags showing what's current and what's depreciated
• An in depth details on XHTML 1.0 tags
• Details on older, depreciated HTML formatting
• Details on the style tag like <div style="[style stuff goes here]">text</div>

Q: How does the buyer contact me with questions?
A: You put your email address in the listing. We do not allow other contact information purely due to risk someone of impersonating someone else by giving their phone number, physical address, or real name. Other things you can put in are contact via an online chat system or a website.

When putting your email address, so remember to obscure the dots and @ symbol a bit as if you get spambots picking up your email address, then it's hard to receive questions from buyers. We've considered putting some sort of system in our website to automate this, but it can't be better than email. We've considered putting a chat system here, but for it to be useful requires you to sit at your computer every minute of every day with it on and if you want to do that, you can just do it for email and have your email rigged up to a program or cell phone that makes a sound whenever email comes. There's also various popular chat systems like AIM and ICQ that you can simply give that out instead and have people contact you there. The only reason you'd want a community marketplace website to do that on its own site is if you want the site to log all the communications.

Q: My language goes right to left, how do I make the text like this in my listing?
A: Sometimes browsers will automatically detect the language and render it properly. Other times, your own language will insert unicode control characters that will reverse all text, even other languages.

Q: I accidentally posted a duplicate listing or some other error; can I get a manual credit?
A: Close your listing and you will get a credit for the remaining days it was not up. We do not credit you for the first day since it took up server resources to index it in search, remove it from search, parse it all, and then in case someone made an offer or copied your listing we must store the image, description and other data for many months to come.

Q: I have my own website where I sell viagra. Shouldn't I just spam and crapflood my site in your listings and that's all?
A: This site isn't some mere place to advertise. It has a lot more features. In the case of selling viagra online, there's lots of other websites selling viagra. Some have higher prices than yours and some have lower. There will always be trouble with getting the right price on your website because there's lots of buyers who won't buy unless it's really cheap and a small number of others who you could have gotten to pay more money so setting it cheap would lower your profits from them. The people who pay more will get you perhaps ten times the profit margin of the stingy people. So what you do is set the bottom auto-counter offer at the minimum amount you need not to lose money. Then set the top auto-counter offer at an amount where you'd make a reasonable profit. Then finally set your preferred price at something that you hope a big spender might pay. Then ask people to send you their offers.

Q: My listing was suspended; can you manually send me the content of it?
A: There's many times where people make good websites or upload a lot of good videos to a video sharing site and then they delete all their content after uploading it. Then, for whatever reason, the content gets removed from the site they uploaded it to and a lot of great content is lost forever. Now, even for listings on this site, you should have keep your own notes on everything about the listings including the content. The only way a suspended listing is visible on this site again is if the listing is unsuspended and that's either if it was suspended by mistake or if you sent in a counter-notice when your listing was suspended due to a DMCA.

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